The Los Angeles Unified School District board has agreed to pay $24 million to three former students to settle claims that they were sexually abused by their Langdon Avenue Elementary School teacher on multiple occasions in his classroom during school hours in 2006 and 2007.
The settlement resolves a lawsuit that accused school officials of ignoring complaints about teacher David Ostovich behaving inappropriately at another L.A. Unified elementary school years before he allegedly molested the girls at Langdon, who were ages 8 and 9 at the time.
Ostovich could not reached for comment. He denied wrongdoing in court filings.
When Ostovich worked at Germain Elementary School, he was the subject of dozens of complaints from administrators, teachers, parents, and students about his inappropriate behavior with young girls, the lawsuit alleges.
Ostovich left that school and got a job at Langdon in North Hills, a San Fernando Valley neighborhood. L.A. Unified administrators never shared those prior complaints with Langdon administrators, court records show.
At Langdon Elementary, the teacher was reprimanded several times but allowed to continue teaching fourth grade and later first grade. In 2006-2007, the lawsuit alleges, he molested two of the plaintiffs. The following year, he took over a first-grade class, where he molested the third plaintiff, the lawsuit alleges. All three girls, who were identified by Jane Doe pseudonyms in the lawsuit, are now adults in their early to mid-20s.
David Ring, attorney for the plaintiffs, said it was a textbook example of “passing the trash,” where a teacher is allowed to quietly move to another school despite repeated complaints about inappropriate behavior with students.
“This is an outrageous case that highlights LAUSD’s systemic failure to protect children from known child molesters,” Ring said in an interview. “The abuse these three women endured forever altered their lives. It could have been entirely prevented if LAUSD had just done its job.”
Ring said there had been more than 20 complaints about the teacher’s behavior before he was removed.
Ostovich had initially begun showing up at Germain as a volunteer because two of his daughters attended the school. He then became a special education aide, and in 2003, complaints were made that he had a girl on his lap and his hand in another girl’s back pocket.
School administrators warned him about his behavior in 2004, prompted by reports that he was rubbing, touching and hugging girls. Despite the reprimand, he was given the principal’s award and got his teaching credential in 2004-2005, according to court documents in the litigation.
A young teacher who observed his continuing inappropriate behavior prevented him from being hired at the school, but because the principal never documented it in writing, Ostovich got a job at Langdon, according to court documents in the case.
In 2006 and 2007, when he was in his late 40s and teaching fourth-graders, Ostovich began grooming and eventually molesting the girls, the lawsuit alleges. He frequently asked young girls to stay with him during recess and lunch behind closed doors in his classroom, the lawsuit alleges, and would touch, rub and improperly hug them in addition to sexually abusing them
In a deposition, one of the girls alleged that he made her stay in his classroom during lunch and sexually abused her. Even during class, he came to her desk and had her sit on his lap and molest her in plain sight of her classmates in ways they knew she was being abused, she said in court documents.
The school then moved him to be a first-grade teacher. In July 2007, new Langdon principal Leah Perroti received a complaint from a parent that Ostovich was “touching” girls,” and he was given a written reprimand and warned a child abuse report would be filed if another accusation was made against him.
Despite the warning, other teachers saw girls on his lap, alone with him and getting hugs, prompting Perroti to file a Suspected Child Abuse Report on him, the lawsuit says. In December 2007, he was removed from the classroom. Perroti learned of the sexual abuse allegations the next year, and Los Angeles police conducted an investigation. court records show.
Ostovich was criminally charged in February 2009 and subsequently pleaded no contest to two counts of battery involving his two fourth-grade victims. His teaching credential was subsequently revoked by the state teaching credential authority.
The three women sued the district in 2021. During a deposition, L.A. Unified’s top administrator, who is now Manhattan Beach’s superintendent, acknowledged that school officials should have filed a suspected child abuse report following each of the incidents at Germain.
